| Jazz |
On a quiet morning in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Dave Stryker walked into a room where jazz history still seems to breathe. The ceiling rises like a modernist chapel, the wood absorbs sound with almost monastic patience, and silence itself feels seasoned by memory. Rudy Van Gelder Studio is not merely a recording space; it is an instrument. For Stryker, stepping inside was the fulfillment of a long-held dream, one he has spoken about often and without irony: to record where so much of the music that shaped his inner ear first found its voice.
Few studios carry such symbolic and sonic weight. Within these walls, the sound of modern jazz was refined, clarified, and, in many ways, defined. Albums released on Blue Note, Verve, and other storied labels emerged from this room with a shared clarity and presence that listeners learned to trust instinctively. Van Gelder’s engineering did more than document performances; it conferred dignity, depth, and permanence. To record here is to enter into a dialogue with history, and to accept its demands.
What makes Stryker’s achievement remarkable is how fully he understands that legacy without becoming beholden to it. Immersed in the aesthetic and discipline that made the studio legendary, he delivers an album that feels unmistakably classic yet quietly adventurous. The program blends original compositions with works by Charlie Parker, Jared Gold, Jerome Kern, and the team of Warren and Dubin. Yet the transitions are so fluid, the voice so unified, that the listener could easily believe every piece was written by Stryker himself. That illusion points to the album’s central truth: Stryker does not interpret compositions so much as absorb them, until they speak with his accent, his timing, his sense of space.
On guitar, he avoids display for its own sake. His playing is inward, conversational, and deeply considered. Melodies unfold as if discovered rather than imposed, harmonies breathe, and rhythm becomes a form of persuasion rather than insistence. These performances feel lived-in. The music carries the calm authority of someone who knows exactly where he is, and why he is there.
That authority has not gone unnoticed by his peers. Pat Metheny once summed up Stryker’s trajectory with characteristic clarity:
“I’ve followed Dave Stryker’s career from his early days in Omaha, through his long collaboration with Stanley Turrentine… and he just keeps getting better, playing with a joy that’s contagious.”
It is a telling endorsement, not only because of Metheny’s stature, but because joy, quiet, communicative, unforced, is precisely what animates this album.
Nowhere is that joy more thoughtfully articulated than in “Van Gelder’s Place,” a composition that functions as both homage and meditation. This is not a nostalgic exercise, nor a historical reenactment. Instead, the piece feels like an architectural portrait translated into sound—a way of listening to the room listening back. Its structure unfolds patiently, its arrangements revealing a deep respect for proportion and balance. Here, Stryker offers a masterclass in shared space, allowing each musician to contribute without crowding the narrative. The result is a piece that converses with the past while remaining fully present.
Stryker’s decision to record in a trio format only heightens the album’s stakes. The trio is jazz’s most demanding configuration: exposed, transparent, unforgiving. There is nowhere to hide imbalance, nowhere to disguise hesitation. Success depends on constant equilibrium and an unspoken agreement among musicians to listen as intently as they play. That this album feels so complete, so relaxed, speaks volumes about the shared experience and mutual trust within the group. Remarkably, it also manages to conjure the intimacy of a live performance while remaining unmistakably a studio creation.
This balance between reverence and forward motion defines Stryker’s work more broadly. Habitually successful yet personally discreet, he approaches composition like a master craftsman, shaping notes and rhythms with care, patience, and restraint. His music salutes tradition without embalming it. One hears a composer comfortable with history, but not confined by it.
Midway through the album comes a moment of pure, disarming charm: “Waiting for Ruby.” The tune glows with an ease that feels almost conversational, a reminder that sophistication need not be austere. It is one of those tracks that seems to smile back at the listener, offering warmth without dilution, complexity without exclusion.
Reinvention has long been one of Stryker’s defining habits. The stylistic core remains recognizable, but the forms evolve, album by album, guided by an almost architectural attention to sound. He is, at heart, a visionary and a listener, someone for whom tone, resonance, and atmosphere matter as much as notes. Recording at Van Gelder Studio, with its unforgiving honesty and storied acoustics, only sharpens that focus. Every detail here is cared for; nothing feels incidental.
As the album draws to a close, it leaves behind not just satisfaction, but anticipation. One cannot help but imagine this trio on festival stages, in concert halls, in rooms where the air itself responds to sound. This is music that is structurally complex yet immediately welcoming, joyful without simplification, radiant without strain. On record, it is already quietly addictive. In performance, it promises to be something more, a reminder that legacy studios still matter, not because of what they once captured, but because artists like Dave Stryker continue to give them something worth remembering.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, December 19th 2025
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Musicians :
Dave Stryker, guitar
Jared Gold, organ
McClenty Hunter, drums
Track Listing :
Van Gelder’s Place
Blue Fire
The Fool On The Hill
Dexterity
Waiting For Ruby
Back And Forth
The Folks Who Live On The Hill
Every Dark St.
Summer Night